Professor Miraz Rahman

Biography

Dr Miraz Rahman is a Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in School of Cancer & Pharmaceutical Sciences, King’s College London. After working three years in the industry, he went back to academia and obtained his PhD from the UCL School of Pharmacy in synthetic medicinal chemistry. His research activities are focused on the application of advanced computational chemistry, synthetic medicinal chemistry and chemical biology techniques to the design, synthesis and evaluation of novel drug-like chemical scaffolds as anticancer and anti-infective agents. He is the author of over 90 research publications, inventor on 15 patents and has more than 15 years research experience in medicinal chemistry and biophysical techniques. Dr Rahman has been working on pyrrolobenzodiazepine-based DNA binding agents for the past 16 years, and developed PBD-based anticancer and antibacterial agents that have been patented and licensed to university spin-out companies. He is working with Public Health England to develop chemical tools to study antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and discover new ways to target multiple drug-resistant pathogens. He has used a combination of homology modelling and advanced computational calculations to study bacterial and fungal efflux pumps and has invented new classes of efflux resistant antibiotics and antifungal agents that are currently being commercialised. The Rahman laboratory is located on the 5th floor of the Franklin Wilkins Building at King’s College London and is funded by grants from industry, charities and research councils. He has experience in early and late-stage drug discovery, and translational research, co-founding oncology biotech companies Transcriptogen Ltd (2013) and Femtogenix Ltd (2015).